Georges de La Tour - Woman Catching Fleas (1630s)
"Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds colour. Consequently it is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion."
From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
"When the silent vision falls into speech, and when the speech in turn, opening up a field of the nameable and the sayable, inscribes itself in that field, in its place, according to its truth - in short, when it metamorphoses the structures of the visible world and makes itself a gaze of the mind, intuitus mentis - this is always in virtue of the same fundamental phenomenon of reversibility which sustains both the mute perception and the speech."
From The Visible and The Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
"'I was going to say...'- You remember various details. But not even all of them shew your intention. It is as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only a few scattered details of it were to be seen...And now it is as if we knew quite certainly what the whole picture respresented. As if I could read the darkness."
From Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
